


Peristellein

by Aloysia_Virgata



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-13 18:13:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12989706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloysia_Virgata/pseuds/Aloysia_Virgata
Summary: One-shot set in the nebulous canon of Season 7





	Peristellein

Love - or lust, at least - responds to audacity.

It responds to leather jackets and loud cars, to bold declarations in summer downpours. To pebbles on bedroom windows, to roses at work, to first class tickets to Paris on a Wednesday afternoon. Drunken first kisses and breathless affairs while spouses are distracted with the banal.

Scully is aware of this, aware of certain cliches inherent in her romantic history. Her roster is littered with wedding rings, power imbalances, V8 engines, tattoos, cigarette smoke, novelty handcuffs, and a few bongs.

It bores her to think of now, couplings in the back seats of cars, hoping against hope that her father wouldn’t find out. Later it was off-campus apartments and hotel rooms when her lovers could afford them. She does not like men in her space. As with cats, it is harder to disengage if you teach them to haunt the doorway.

She cracks open a sunflower seed against her manicured nail, thinking. Mulder is audacious, certainly. His bad-boy couch and untidy flop of hair. His personnel file several inches thick with infractions he had personally invented. Mulder likes to speculate that Kersh and Skinner drink Pepto straight from economy sized jugs thanks to him.

Is at simple as that? She hopes not, but doesn’t trust herself. She is aware that she can hurt him, and badly.

Next to her, Mulder is sleeping. Moonlight falls across his bare chest in silver bands. His ribs rise and fall steadily, and Scully wonders if his breath is pulled like the tide. There is something primal about Mulder, some elemental quality that puts him in touch with nameless mystery.

She touches his nose with a fingertip, which makes him swat at her in his sleep. She bites back a laugh, then places the hulled seed on his bottom lip. His tongue pokes out, curious, then flicks the seed away. Scully smiles. He is her favorite experiment.

It has been three weeks of this and she doesn’t like the successful feel of it. She favors one-night stands and relationships doomed from the start; underwear-in-your-purse arrangements. There is no obvious escape plan for this situation, and it violates her instincts at a Darwinian level. Maybe she needs a dopamine inhibitor, or at least a careful evaluation of her limbic system.

Mulder shifts, curls onto his side, and reaches for her. Reflexively, she pulls back. His brow furrows in his sleep. She doesn’t know what to do, how to be a lover and a colleague and a woman and a doctor, all to the same person. She should have slept with him early on and avoided all of this baggage. Six months, transfer, done.

But he’s not just Mulder now, he’s Mulder, and she has to take responsibility for that.

Scully sighs. “Mulder,” she hisses.

“Mmmmmfff,” he mumbles, rolling onto his back.

She straightens her camisole, adjusting her breasts under the Lycra. Scully tucks her hair behind her ears.

Moving deliberately, quietly, she straddles his abdomen. Her new underwear ride lower on her hips than the old ones.

He wakes up now, blinking, looking pleased. He slides his hands over her and she admires them, thinking again that they would have been good surgeon’s hands. His fine motor skills are excellent.

“Hello, Scully,” he says with sleepy sweetness. “Do make yourself comfortable.” He pushes her shirt up to stroke her navel. Her thighs tighten and he smiles.

She is afraid that this is love and that she will ruin him with it. She wants to save him with her self-denial, the way she tried to with her cancer, with Salt Lake City. But how can she when he looks at her like this, with a kind of reverence that is so much more than lust?

She is afraid too of ruining herself, of becoming her mother; placid and sweet and waiting for her man. Her flame reduced to a hearth-fire, her own spark just a lighthouse.

Scully presses her palms to his flat belly and finds herself in danger of crying.

Mulder, tuned to her like an antenna, looks concerned. “Hey,” he says. “Scully?”

She cups his scratchy face in her hands. She doesn’t say I love you, doesn’t say she desperately wants him to try again to father the children she’ll never have, doesn’t say he’s filled up her heart so much she’s afraid it will rupture, doesn’t even claim it’s not him, it’s her.

“I’m hungry,” she says. It’s a good word for how he makes her feel.

Mulder laughs, and she is reassured to be good for things other than sex and clandestine autopsies. Dopamine flows through her, but oxytocin does too.

Scully lays down with her head tucked under his chin. She breathes in the scent of his neck, sighing as he strokes her back.

“What do you want to eat?” he murmurs, breath warm in her ear.

This, she thinks. She wants to devour this moment and keep it safe in her hollow belly.

“Hashbrowns and scrambled eggs with cheese.” She needs dense food to center her right now. Stupor through digestion.

“Oh, yeah, you know I like it when you talk atherosclerosis. You want some sausage, baby?”

Scully licks his throat. “Cinnamon buns,” she purrs. “French toast. Bacon.”

Mulder groans theatrically and she is afraid that he’s going to flip her over and tug her panties down. Sex with him has been revelatory, but Scully has a horror of being reduced to a naughty secretary. She doesn’t want him goosing her at the filing cabinet.

She waits, tensed in the dark.  
“Scully,” he says, stroking her hair, “I just want you to know that the sexiest thing about you will always be your unbridled lust for greasy spoons.”

Her shoulders loosen for the first time in a fortnight.

“Where do you want to go?” Mulder inquires. “Denny’s or a real diner?”

“Don’t care.” She pulls the sheet over them.

“Scully?”

She nuzzles closer.

“Scully?”

“Hmmmmm?”

“Scully, I think you look great in that outfit, but the law says pants.”

She means to get up, she does, but suddenly it’s morning and from the kitchen comes the sizzle of eggs in a pan.


End file.
